Archive for 1 December 2005
Why Nordic Characters Appear to Work Only in Some Web Browsers
1 December 2005 in Root | Comments (0)
I’m now going to answer the question that I’ve been asking:
The reason why Opera and Internet Explorer do not seem to work properly with Nordic characters is that they have, by default, enabled the feature UTF-8 URL encoding. By turning this option off, you will be able to view the page åäö.html.
To turn UTF-8 URL encoding off in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and uncheck:
“Always send URLs as UTF-8 (requires restart)”
To turn off UTF-8 encoding in Opera, go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network and uncheck:
“Encode international addresses with UTF-8″
There, now after restarting IE, or just clicking OK in Opera’s options window, you should be able to view åäö.html. In Opera, you must manually enter the URL to that file: http://www.filips.net/åäö.html and then press [Enter] (since this page is UTF-8 encoded, Opera will send the URL encoded in the same encoding that this page is in).
Well, now most webmasters and webdevelopers are probably asking: do we have to ask our visitors to turn off UTF-8 URL encoding in their browsers manually? The answer is no, you shouldn’t have to. It should be possible to configure your webserver to accept UTF-8 URL requests, but it might be hard to get it working. If you are on Apache running on some open source operating system, then you might be interested in hearing that mod_fileiri can allow both UTF-8 as well as ISO-8859-1 encoded URLs when configured the correct way. But that is probably no use to you if you are with a web hotel.
However, note that you will have to test your web applications together with UTF-8 enabled to see if there are any cross site scipting vunerabilities in them. The UTF-8 characters are a much bigger bunch than the old ASCII space ever was, not to mention the ISO-8859-1 encoding space.
If there is a simpler way of getting UTF-8 encoded URLs to work on my server, please let me know. Until otherwise, I’ll let my server be alone for the moment: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” 